Documents / Official release
This file, released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library under FOIA request 2006-0476-F, holds White House correspondence records for case 243544. In a July 8, 1997 letter to President Clinton, Kent Jeffrey of the International Roswell Initiative submitted more than 20,000 signed copies of the Roswell Declaration, which asks for an Executive Order declassifying UFO information. On December 9, 1997 the Air Force replied that such an order was unnecessary because declassification under E.O. 12958 was already underway.
“Spencer”1 page
MUFON UFO JOURNAL Prometheus Books, 1997, he, 264 pp., iIIus., $26.95 ISBN 1-57392 127-0 June Number 350 Page 18 Reviewed by Karl T. Pflock ThiS book is like the Roswell case itself. There's a lot less here than meets the eye. Much is promised, little is delivered. No matter where the reader may stand with respect to the facts and truth of Roswell, disappointment and frustration is inevitable with this quickie cut-and paste job, rushed into print by the de facto book publishing arm of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) to capitalize on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell non-crash/retrieval and push CSICOP's line that UFOs can't be, therefore they aren't. . At the outset, Korff correctly observes, "The Roswell incident, and all that surrounds it, is a complex web of events, not easily understand able nor explainable until examined fully and in painstaking detail." He then proceeds to skip across the surface of the murky Roswell waters like one of Kenneth Arnold's saucers, with the all important details left submerged in the depths and few pains taken. The same is true of his editors. The book is riddled with typographical errors, bad grammar and usage, easily caught factual errors, etc. It is a slap-dash job by all concerned, and tells us more about CSICOP's agenda than it does about Roswell. The publisher's jacket blurb declares Korff s work "a ground-breaking investigation that fi nally determines the real truth [as opposed to the "unreal truth"?] behind the Roswell mystery." In fact, while Korff brings some interesting tidbits to light, all the important ground was broken and well plowed some years ago-principally by Robert Todd, Prof. C. B. Moore, Capt. James McAndrew, and, yes, myself. The fundamental elements of the "real truth" have been publicly known since June 1994, revealed in detail in my Roswell in Perspective (RiP). These were mas sively supplemented by The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, pub lished in 1995 by a reluctant Air Force goaded into action by New Mexico Congressman Steve Schiff. In the intervening years, Robert Todd, I, and others independently have provided further elaboration, clarification, and correction in occa sional articles, papers, and letters of comment in UFO journals, on the Internet, and even in CSI- COP's own magazine, the Skeptical Inquirer. Hey, CSICOP: Been there, done that! Although we are told this volume culminates 16 years' research, of the book's more than 350 notes to text, only a few suggest any original in vestigation by the author, and most of these cite telephone interviews conducted in the fall of 1996. The rest show us where Korff did the lion's share of his "painstaking" research: in the pages of other books about Roswell. Tellingly, . some of these notes give the reader a bum steer-as for example, citing my RiP as the source of this intriguing quote attributed to Roswell researcher Kevin Randle: "If I had to rely on the public record [in the Roswell case], I'd throw up. The evidence is not strong and it's not compelling." . Large chunks of text are pages-long extracts of others' words and findings, notably Todd's, and nearly 10 percent of the book is given over to an appendix, "The Roswell Incident and the NYU Balloon Project," lifted from the Air Force's RosweliReport (from which Korff also cribbed most of his illustrations). The lengthy bibliography is larded with references having no bearing on the case at hand and, oddly, does not include my RiP, the only skeptical look at Roswell written by what Korffs CSICOP pa trons call a pro-UFOlogist and from which Korff lifts a line out of context and uses it to misrepre sent my views on what actually "crashed" at Roswell (see Korff, p. 227, and Pflock, pp. 113 117, especially p. 116). While Korff says and I believe this was inadvertent. it tells us something of the rigor of his research. One of the enticements Korff and his pub lisher dangle before the unsuspecting is the promise of "information never before pub lished-military records, formerly classified pro jects, and correspondence-revelations powerful enough to change public opinion forever." It turns out the book contains but six examples of such, none of the earth-shattering significance touted in the foregOing hype. Briefly, they are: (I) Lydia Sleppy worked at Albuquerque's Radio KOAT in early July 1947, when she says she received a call from the late Johnny McBoyle, station manager of a KOAT affiliate in Roswell. As Sleppy tried to send McBoyle's "scoop" about a crashed flying saucer over a news wire, she claims. the "receive" bell on her Teletype began ringing, and a "stop transmitting" message from the FBI was printed automatically. Korff was advised by the FBI that it did not have such an intercept capability in New Mexico in July 1947 and had no record of such an inci dent. Moreover, the Bureau said the Teletype1997
Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 47 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.